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Thursday, January 5, 2017

Starship of State: Governing the Future: Introduction

Politics in Pop Culture Science Fiction

Death and taxes. According to the old saying there are few things as certain as death and taxes. The first represents the inevitably of mortality, that all living things die. The second represents the inevitability of government, that all societies larger than a few individuals require some kind of order. In early hunter-gatherer tribes, it may have amounted to no more than a certain fluid division of labor. Hunters hunt, gatherers gather, everyone contributes to the good of the tribe. As societies grew more complex, so did the institutions required to govern them, giving rise to tribal confederations, city-states, empires, nations and republics. These units of organization require citizens to contribute something to the common good, usually through taxes, to keep society functioning. If they fail, the result is a state of anarchy that may be more taxing than the taxes were.

In fiction, death is often the focus of the plot. Literary works often use the stress of death to wring emotion out of characters, and some story genres, such as thrillers and mysteries, often start with the death of a character or require the threat of death as the primary source of tension. Certainly, there are genres and subgenres of fiction that also deal with taxes, and the governments that collect them. The police detective in the mystery novel is paid by a municipal government to investigate crimes and enforce laws. The spy in the thriller can waste tons of tax revenues on fancy machinegun-armed sports cars. The stoplight in the romance novel that makes the heiress late for her yoga lesson was presumably bought with somebody’s tax dollars. You can’t build a Death Star if you don’t have the money, and the organizational skills, to do so. So even in fictions where these institutions do not play a vital role, plausibility suggests that they are a vital part of the underlying society that the characters live in.

In science fiction, writers and film producers have the luxury of reimagining these institutions. The fantastic settings allow them to have characters that live under governments totally different from those that exist in the real world, either currently or historically. Of course, some stories are more dependent on these details than others. The Empire was vital to George’s Lucas’ Star Wars saga, since it was the rebellion against the imperial government, and the struggle to destroy its Death Star, that propelled so much of the story. The Federation featured in Star Trek may be more in the background, but regulations such as the Prime Directive reveal things about the political foundations of that society. And though the platoon of marines we see in Aliens suggest the presence of a government institution, the influence wielded by Burke and his ilk suggest the true power may be vested in a corporate oligarchy. Each of these film/television series, and a dozen others that have been created in the last 50 years, have made predictions about how the future (or in Star Wars case a long time ago) would be governed.

To many people the subject of politics can be deadly dull. They are happy to ignore all of the invisible work done by governments to support their daily lives, or to complain about the taxes they have to pay to support that work, but they are in no way interested in the minutiae of political or government activity. For these people, the series of blog posts I’m planning on the politics of the future, exploring the governing systems described in pop culture science fiction may not be that interesting. Showing senatorial trade route debates in the prequel episodes of the Star Wars saga was not well received by fans or critics. But if the political aspects of science fiction world building interest you, I will be posting at least seven or eight of these essays on the politics and government of the fictional future, exploring everything from Star Wars’ Republic and Empire to the feudal system seen in Dune. How do these institutions work? How do they compare with real-world equivalent systems? What are creators and producers trying to say with their portrait of governance? These are some of the questions I will explore over the next few weeks.

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About This Blog

This blog is about narrative, the stories, both fiction and non-fiction, that we tell about our universe and ourselves. What is the genesis of these stories? How and why do we tell them? What do they mean? Topics will cover both the craft of storytelling, mostly regarding written forms such a novels, creative non-fiction and short stories, as well as analysis and critique of narratives through movie, television and book reviews.

About Me

Harboring Secrets

My science fiction short story Meta has been published as part of the Chesapeake Bay Writers Anniversary Anthology, Harboring Secrets: Tales and Reflections from The Chesapeake Bay Writers, available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Four Mile Circus

This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying . . . but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice . . . but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks . . . but nobody loved it.

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

In Alfred Bester's classic 1956 science fiction novel Tiger, Tiger (published for the less than literate masses of North America as The Stars My Destination) protagonist Gully Foyle masquerades as Jeffrey Fourmyle, wealthy buffon who owns and operates a traveling freak show known as the Four Mile Circus. The circus was a prop that allowed Foyle to travel among the social elite as he sought information on the Vorga, a ship that had left him for dead on the wreckage of the spaceship Nomad. Driven by revenge, Foyle would transcend his common origins to alter the course of human history.

The old year soured as pestilence poisoned the planets. The war gained momentum and grew from a distant affair of romantic raids and skirmishes in space to a holocaust in the making. It had become evident that the last of the World Wars was done and the first of the Solar Wars had begun....An ominous foreboding paralyzed every home from Baffin Island to the Falklands. The dying year was enlivened only by the advent of the Four Mile Circus.